Mac SSD and backup questions
 

The house computer here is a mid 2010 Mac mini, dual core 2.4 GHz. It was really showing its age, running very slowly with frequent spinning pinwheels. Last year, I increased RAM from 4 GB to 16 GB. Performance improved significantly, but application launch was still very slow and the pinwheel still appeared and stayed present for long periods. I started suspecting issues with the original 320 GB HDD.

Yesterday I decided to clone the drive to a 480 GB SSD, install the SSD internally, then download the El Capitan installer and re-install the OS. This took a long time, the cloning apparently went wrong, the Mac wouldn't boot from the SSD so I had to boot from the original HDD attached external and repeat the process. But now everything works and boy is this old computer feeling snappy! Like a new machine.

Have we had problems with SSD reliability? I could leave the old HDD connected external and do a weekly clone of the SSD to the HDD, to have an alternative bootup drive should the SSD fail.

Now to think about backup strategy. The internal drive, now a SSD, holds the OS, apps, and miscellaneous files. I keep the photo and music libraries on an external 2 TB drive. A second external 3 TB drive is my backup. I use TimeMachine to back up the internal drive and the libraries drive to the backup drive, and also every week I clone the internal and libraries drive to different partitions on the backup drive. The problem with this is that I only have one backup drive, so if it fails then I have no backup, and also that all the drives are cabled to the Mac, so if someone steals my computer they might take my backup drive too.

I could put another backup drive in a different room, use powerline networking to connect. But if the house burns down, I lose that drive too.

Anyone use a cloud service to backup 1.5 TB of data, affordably?. Which do you recommend?

I use DropBox. $9.99 for 1 TB. Constant mirroring. Effortless.

Dang, that is not expensive, for a terabyte.

Yeh, that's incredibly useful; not only is it a backup, also handily addresses the "oh, darn, that's on the other computer" issue when you're out and about. Browse/access from your phone/tablet too.

Also worth considering Backblaze; Personal backups $50 per year per machine; unlimited backup and file size/types - no limit on external drives either.

But these are actual backups (last I looked, you don't get file versioning with DropBox until you spring for Business class - and there was a minimum of 5 users for that).

Backblaze are also pushing the envelope on storage pods using commodity hardware, and publishing stats on which of the drives they buy die (they just buy whatever they can get quantity of at the largest sizes/best prices at any given time) and at what rates - pretty cool.